


Agent Erebus

by theficisalie



Series: The Ink Files [3]
Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Gen, Superheroes, Superpowers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-31
Updated: 2011-10-31
Packaged: 2017-10-27 00:53:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/289785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theficisalie/pseuds/theficisalie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brian has had a long, hard day on top of a long couple of years. His day is about to get a whole lot worse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Agent Erebus

**Author's Note:**

> beta: [kazzbot](http://kazzbot.livejournal.com)

“Next!”

Brian moved his tray along the shiny aluminum slide. The selection of food on the other side of the sneeze guard was limited at this late hour, but it was worth it to wait until the cafeteria had been cleared of the noisy children that generally flooded it. It wasn’t that Brian hated kids or teenagers; he just didn’t need to be in an enclosed space with several hundred of them, especially when he could feel a migraine trying to force its way out through his eyes.

He saw the soup a moment before Margie lifted up her head and her mass of blue curly hair. Brian sighed. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “Sweet Potato.”

“Sorry, Snookums,” Margie said. “If I’d a known you were comin’ in late today, I woulda saved you some toast.”

“It’s fine,” he said, accepting the bowl. “I’ll be fine. And my name’s Brian, Margie.”

“Honey,” Margie said, cocking her hip to the side and leveling a wooden spoon in his direction, “if you could take me in a fight, I’d call you by your first name, you know that.”

“Is there coffee, at least?” he asked, wondering if a trip to the “Adults Only” carafe would be worth it. It was all the way across the cafeteria, and he had already been on his feet all day.

“Apple Pie,” Margie said, eyes twinkling. “Ever since those Way boys got shipped off to Chicago, we’ve been overflowing with coffee.”

“Right,” Brian muttered. “Thanks, Margie.”

“Any time,” the woman said. She tapped her spoon on the sneeze guard when he turned around and shouted “Next!”

The coffee was still blessedly hot when he poured it into one of the tiny cafeteria mugs, the smell of medium roast wafting up like an angel walking on the clouds. He was just about to set the carafe down when a quiet clearing of a throat made him start. It was just Patrick Stump, smiling sheepishly from behind his sideburns and hat.

“Pour me one, too?” he asked, voice quiet. “I’ll trade you coffee for aspirin.”

Brian pressed his lips together in a tight line but pulled two cups off the tray where they were upside down. Where Patrick Stump was, Pete Wentz was never very far behind. “Thought you guys were still out roaming,” he muttered, filling the cups to leave room for cream and a copious amount of sugar in Wentz’s case.

“Oh coffee!” a familiarly obnoxious voice exclaimed.

“Keep it down, Pete,” Patrick hissed, palm out with a pair of white pills in Brian’s direction.

“Why,” Pete whispered, almost as loudly as his talking voice, “Are we telling secrets?”

Brian put his coffee on his tray (now at least the dreaded soup was no longer alone) and slipped in to the first table he saw. Stump and Wentz were still hissing at each other, so Brian ignored them and downed the aspirin dry.

“Schec,” Pete said just as Brian was about to take a mouthful of soup. Apparently having won the volume argument with Stump. “You’re a growing boy! You need more than just soup, man.”

“There wasn’t anything else,” Brian muttered. The best way to eat Sweet Potato soup, or anything that he didn’t really like, was to eat it as quickly as possible and preferably follow it up with a warm piece of bread dripping with butter.

“You want me to call Gabe? I’ll call Gabe,” Pete said, flipping out his phone.

“No,” Brian said, but Pete was already chirping insults about Saporta’s mother over the line. “Fuck,” he muttered. Fine. He would just eat quickly and then he’d refill his coffee, go up to his office, do paperwork for six hours, and try not to die of the headache that was still a jackhammer on concrete in his brain.

“Sorry,” Patrick said, sitting beside Pete but far enough away that the man’s wild gestures didn’t mean an elbow slamming into his ribs. Brian looked away from them and back to the soup. Sweet Potato was his least favourite kind, but he was a grown fucking adult and he hadn’t eaten in a good eight hours. He was almost on the edge of desperate for food, so fucking Sweet Potato it was.

“Gabe’s bringing fruit,” Pete said, hanging up his phone with a snap. It was one of those tacky gold flip phones, but it had a keyboard. Presumably so he could text Mikey Way at all hours of the night. “I mean, he said he was going to check his rolodex, but I’m pretty sure that’s code for fruit.”

Brian curled his fingers around his mug of coffee. They were still cold from earlier, when he’d been forced to stand in a rainstorm with three armed officers, just waiting around for backup to arrive so they could storm an abandoned warehouse. The rogue they’d been looking for hadn’t even been in the dilapidated building, but what had been in there were a handful of angry, radioactive raccoons. Raccoons, as it turned out, were fucking strong, and these ones had enhanced genes from the barrel that had sent Brian’s watch-turned-geiger-counter ticking like mad. They’d put up one hell of a fight, and Brian was idly wondering whether the long scratch marking his arm from shoulder to elbow was going to become infected or make his own mutation even worse. Already he had trouble staying visible on dark nights where the shadows were long and cool and inviting.

Brian brought his cup up to his mouth, sipping thoughtfully, when Pete’s hand came out of nowhere to slam loudly on the surface of the table. “Mister Schechter!”

“Agent,” Patrick said, a pained expression on his face.

“Right,” Pete said. “Agent Schechter.”

“That isn’t his agent name,” Patrick muttered, tugging his hat lower on his head.

“Come on, Wentz,” Saporta said, materializing out of thin air with a disgruntled Victoria. He sat next to Brian on the bench, all long limbs and an easy grin. Brian smothered a sigh and downed the rest of his coffee. “Everyone knows his name is Agent No Fucking Swearing.”

Pete brayed a loud laugh. Patrick looked like he was trying to disappear into his plaid shirt. Gabe just gleamed a grin in Brian’s direction and produced an apple and a bag of chips from inside his purple sweater. “I brought the goods,” he said, waggling his eyebrows suggestively.

Brian hadn’t had time to do paperwork for almost a week now, and he was probably going to be up all night signing things and reading other, more boring things, and trying to decipher the new detective’s inscrutable handwriting. He was definitely going to need food at some point. And another cup of coffee. “Thanks. Hang on, aren’t you and your team supposed to be across the pond?” Brian could still remember the bass that had pounded through the entire compound when Saporta had taken his gang and flown out to England. He could have sworn that had just been two weeks ago.

“Maybe,” Gabe said, his grin cheeky and mischievous now. “Maybe I was picking up some sandwiches at a bakery. Maybe I got a call, said you needed some fuckin’ food. Maybe I asked Vicky to gimme a lift. Gotta make sure you take proper care of yourself. Sir.”

The world was a big place, but there weren’t that many officially registered SuperHumans in it so far, and Brian had trained a good hundred or so little up-and-comers in his time as a Senior Agent. Seeing his pupils making their own teams, relocating to wherever problems were arising, and getting themselves out of trouble...it made him feel fucking old. “You made Vicky teleport you over here, from England, to give me an apple and some chips?”

“And a sandwich!” Gabe exclaimed, pulling a brown paper bag out from inside his sweater. How much stuff was he hiding in there?

“He isn’t even going to say thanks after,” Vicky drawled from behind Gabe. “Self-righteous asshole.”

“You love me, baby,” Gabe said. “We’re still on for that thing, right?” he asked Pete, who nodded. “Excellent. Well, gentlemen, it’s been a real slice, but me and my maiden have got to truck on back to the motherland. If you will excuse me.”

“If you call me ‘maiden’ one more time,” Vicky muttered, “I will drop you in the Pacific.”

“You can’t do that!” Gabe exclaimed, scrambling up from the cafeteria table to take Vicky’s hand.

“You bet your fucking ass I can. And I’ll do it, too.”

“Well, you suck,” Gabe said as they disappeared.

“Gabe’s cool, right? I mean, he used to be a little shit and I was always all ‘Gabanti, don’t you sneak alcohol to those minors’ but he’s really shaped up and he is always there when you need him, you know? You just gotta call him up on the phone and he’ll get Vicky to bring him to you and then you can have the tallest cuddle of your life,” Pete said, face bright. Patrick made a non-committal sound that Brian thought probably meant he was paying no attention to the current conversation.

“I need some more fucking coffee,” Brian said.

“Okay,” Pete said, and kept talking.

Working with the police was less rewarding than it was exhausting. The hours were long and unforgiving and the work was both physically strenuous and mentally taxing. What Brian really needed was about six more cups of coffee, but he needed to get to sleep sometime tomorrow, so he just filled up his cup once, to the brim.

He left Pete and Patrick with a brief wave, which was reciprocated by Patrick and not by Pete. Pete just kept talking as Brian picked up his future meal before heading up to the office level. Everything up until this point of the day had seemed to be going horribly downhill, from the hours standing in the rain to the radioactive pests to the worst soup ever created, but maybe this appearance of food (the chips were even a kind he kind of liked), meant that things were turning around for him. His paperwork didn’t seem quite as daunting when he had a hot cup of coffee on one side and the promise of a non-empty stomach on the other.

And then the phone rang.

Brian sighed. He should just let it go to voicemail, because the last time he’d sat down to finish his mountain of work and he’d answered the phone, he’d ended up with his arm wrapped in bandages and hidden beneath the standard-issue blue button-up police shirt.

The phone rang again.

“Fuck it,” Brian muttered, and picked it up. It was probably the Chief of Police with another pointless stakeout for him. “Hello?”

“Agent Erebus?”

“Um, yes,” Brian said. The voice was unfamiliar. He was getting a bad feeling about all of this. He picked up his cup of coffee with a sigh. “This is Agent Erebus. Who are you?”

“Thank fucking god. It’s, oh, sorry. It’s Agent Taurus. Speaking. Fuck.”

Taurus? That was...Toro, if Brian was remembering his secret identities right. Toro was the healer on Way’s team. The team that little Frank Iero had been placed into. Right. “And why exactly are you calling me?”

“We, uh, fuck. We can’t go to the police, they told us...” The line crackled, static buzzing loud in the place of words for half a second before it picked up voices again. “...hours, and they won’t h--”

“Taurus?” Brian said as the man’s voice crackled out again. He frowning at his handset and tapped the mic side. “Back up. Hello? Can you hear me?”

“--ust need you to c--”

“Taurus,” Brian said again.

“out here. What?”

“I can’t hear a word you’re saying, the line keeps cutting out.”

“Fuck, X,” Taurus snapped, voice pulling away from the phone. “Stop texting your fucking neg of a boyfriend and fix the goddamn line.”

There was a loud THUNK, and then a lower, but much more panicky voice, was speaking into the phone. “Erebus, is that you, we didn’t know who to fucking call, we went to the cops and they told us twenty-four hours, but he’s been kidnapped, we know he was, and we don’t know what the fuck else to do, we’re desperate and --”

Whoever had taken the phone yelped and then Taurus came back on, much calmer and clearer than a few minutes ago. “Sorry, Erebus. You still there?”

Brian finished his coffee. “Yes,” he said, looking mournfully into the bottom of his mug.

“Sorry. Fucking...Agent Umbrella took the phone. X was texting Chaos, probably, and, well. Sorry. Um. We need your help.”

“Aren’t you in Chicago?” Brian asked, wondering if he should call Gabe, annoying as he was, and put in a request for a venti triple shot anything.

“Yes. That’s part of the problem. We don’t really know the city well enough to find him, and we’re working on some highly classified and confidential shit, and there’s no way he ran away. Also there was a struggle, and, fuck.”

“Who, exactly, has gone missing?” Brian interrupted, rubbing his temple. His headache was back in full force. Maybe it was a migraine. “You can’t file a report for 24 hours, that’s true, but you should probably endeavour to find whoever’s missing before the police get involved because you’ll have to fill out fifty more forms to get back a Super.”

“It’s Ink,” Taurus said. “Who’s gone missing. Agent Ink.”

Frank.

Fuck.

“I’m not going to get this paperwork done, am I?” Brian asked.

“Does that mean you’ll come?”

“Give me half an hour,” Brian said.

“Bring your paperwork, we’ll make sure it gets done, sir,” Taurus said. “And thank you, in advance, oh my god.”

“Make sure there’s coffee ready,” Brian muttered and hung up the phone. He tapped his fingers on his desk before rifling through the papers on the left. At the bottom of the pile was a manila file marked “AGENT INK: CLASSIFIED INFORMATION, CLASS B4 SUPERHUMAN, CALYPSO INITIATIVE”. In addition to being a Class A little shit, Brian was pretty sure that Frank was well on his way to becoming a Class A SuperHuman with the way his power was seemingly growing, if he wasn’t already. There were only a handful of Class As that Brian knew about, and even fewer of them actually worked for the government.

The world couldn’t afford to lose that snide little punk.

Brian grimaced and put Frank’s file in his desk. He shuffled all of his paperwork into one giant pile before picking up the phone and dialing a number he had sworn never to use. It only rang once.

“Agent Good Times, how may I pleasure you?”

“Is this Midtown?” Brian asked.

“Schech!” Gabe exclaimed. “Hell yeah it’s me! Sorry, Erebus, I mean. Yo, it’s been forever since I’ve seen you.”

“It’s been ten minutes,” Brian muttered. “Look, I need Glamour’s help.”

“Hey, yeah, no problem. Vick!” the man yelled, probably without pulling his phone away from his ear. “Erebus needs you, yo! He’s in his office, yo, you in your office?”

“Yes,” Brian said. “I’m hanging up.”

Vicky was there before he could put the phone back on its cradle. “You called?” she asked.

“Ah,” he said, starting. Seeing someone appear in front of you was always just a little bit surprising. “Yes. I need to get to Chicago. Umbrella’s team needs help. They’ve lost Ink.”

“Dead lost or puking in the street lost?” she asked, watching as Brian heaved his stack of paperwork off his desk.

“Probably kidnapped,” Brian grunted, making his way around the desk to stand in front of her.

“That is so five years ago,” Vicky scoffed, putting one sharp-nailed hand on his arm. “Hold your breath!”


End file.
